The global marketplace is forcing companies to respond quickly to dynamic market conditions while reducing costs. Businesses increasingly must have the ability to meet, or beat, competitors by introducing new and innovative products and services. These new offerings are often customer-facing and transaction-oriented, and introduce additional complexity and higher levels of volatility for the enterprise computing resources called upon to provision these products and services. Higher transaction volumes and demands for improved response times create an ever-increasing need for computing resources.
In a conventional enterprise computing environment, computing resources are usually manually assigned and provisioned to support various applications. This approach creates several problems. As the assigned resources are generally fixed at a point in time to meet a current demand level, the conventional enterprise computing environment is ill-equipped to adapt over time to meet increasing demand levels for some applications and decreasing demand levels for others. In order to meet minimum service requirements, computing resources are often assigned and provisioned according to peak-level demands. As a result, during periods of less than peak-level demands, computing resources are underutilized.
With the advent of grid computing, conventional enterprise computing environments have been adapted to “virtualize” applications so that computing resources may be dynamically provisioned to applications in response to current demand levels. For example, the GRIDSERVER Virtual Enterprise Edition adaptive grid infrastructure software available from DataSynapse, New York, N.Y. provides a computing operating environment that virtualizes application and data services, independent of specific system resources. Client applications submit service requests to the grid environment, and GRIDSERVER dynamically provisions services on specific system resources in the grid to meet the service requests. For example, requests from multiple client applications cause GRIDSERVER to create multiple service instances to handle the requests in parallel on different computing resource nodes in the computing resources grid. As a result, underutilization of resources can be substantially reduced, and service levels can be commensurately improved.
GRIDSERVER has been particularly effective at providing a virtualized computing environment that adapts to meet resource demands for computing-intensive processes. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/395,586, upon which the present application is based and which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety, discloses a virtualized computing environment that effectively adapts to meet resource demands for high throughput, low latency transactional applications such as distributed web applications and other services-based application. The present application is directed to an inventive method by which computing resources in this virtualized computing environment may be dynamically and adaptively provisioned to optimally serve the web and other services-based applications.